George’s at the Cove: Executive chef Trey Foshee was Zimmern’s on-camera guide for two days, and his fine-dining cooking talents will be featured. One of Foshee’s dishes was sea urchin with poached egg, dry-aged beef broth and Chino Farm mustard greens.

His show is not “Fear Factor,” Zimmern said when he took a break from his “Bizarre Foods America” shoot in San Diego, expected to air on the Travel Channel in August.

We met in the high-end dining room at George’s California Modern in La Jolla. It was a cool February evening. Zimmern had just wrapped up a shoot with George’s executive chef Trey Foshee and locally caught sea urchin.

And over an iced double espresso, Zimmern made eating through the animal kingdom sound like a seminar on cultural diversity. About devouring testicles all over the world, he said:

“It’s a great attention-grabber, but that’s not why I do it. What I’m interested in are the stories of people and places. And the best lens for understanding culture is food.”

Even the most casual viewer of “Bizarre Foods” would say it’s “edu-tainment.” He’ll agree that he tells stories from the fringe. But if you suggest Zimmern was eating through fruit bats in Samoa and snake penises in China mostly for the gross-out factor, you’ll get a little reprimand (this reporter did).

“You can do a story about cracking open a piece of shellfish and eating its gonads” — he was describing how sea urchin reproductive organs are eaten raw — “and people can have a nice laugh at that. I certainly am an entertainer, and I understand the comic benefit of it.

“And I also understand the deadly earnestness of my subject matter as well. I made a very conscious decision with ‘Bizarre Foods’ to do a show that was entertainment, but that is shot through with 20 percent of deadly seriousness. And people can take from it what they want.”